DNC chair: Martin O’Malley right on border kids’ ‘certain death’

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz also thinks deporting children detained at the border is sending them back to “certain death.”

The White House went apoplectic last month when likely 2016 presidential candidate Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said, “We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death.” Tuesday night, Wasserman Schultz said twice — strongly — that she thinks O’Malley was right.

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“Not only do I agree with him, but,” the Florida congresswoman said, launching into a long story about a boy she’d met during a visit to a facility in Miami who told her of being kidnapped and forced into the drug trade, and showed her a bullet wound through the back of his arm.

“‘If you send me back, I’m not going to survive,’” she said, quoting the boy. “And he had a friend who didn’t survive.”

Ramos pressed a second time: “So you do agree that if we send them back, many of them would be killed?”

“They are in jeopardy,” she said. “Many of them are in dire jeopardy.”

The issue of immigration is a particularly sensitive one for this White House, which has bristled at attacks from allies — even shutting out the National Council of La Raza from further discussions after it referred to Obama as “deporter-in-chief” in March. And this summer, when the president and his administration are weighing executive actions on immigration policy amid the political heat of the midterms, they have been even more on guard.

That makes Wasserman Schultz’s implicit critique of the White House even more problematic for Democrats.

Traditionally, a national party chair’s function is purely to support and back up a president of the same party, standing behind his politics and policy no matter what. Wasserman Schultz’s spokesman contends that she would have, but “wasn’t aware of” O’Malley’s statements or the blowback they caused until contacted by POLITICO — even though O’Malley has been a high-profile Democratic surrogate, the issue received wide news coverage at the time and Ramos referred specifically to O’Malley in his questions.

“That was the first she was hearing about Martin O’Malley,” said Wasserman Schultz’s congressional office communications director Sean Bartlett. “She was reacting to Jorge’s question and thinking about the tour she had just come from.”

“I guess it’s too much to ask that the chair of the DNC have enough political sense not to put the president in a tougher spot than he already is in,” said one senior Democrat. “What they need to do is sideline her.”

The border crisis roiled Washington earlier in the summer, with Congress leaving for its August recess without acting on the emergency supplemental funding bill the White House put out which would have provided additional money for lawyers and judges to hold asylum hearings for the children pouring in from Central America. Obama himself has said that at least some of the children should be allowed to stay, once through the proper processes, and his administration has been working to house them in facilities around the country, like the one Wasserman Schultz toured in Miami before her interview.

The White House did not comment on Wasserman Schultz’s comments, nor did it attack her the way it did O’Malley for his comments. The White House declined to explain its two different reactions.

O’Malley’s statement became a particular source of controversy after it came out that, when White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Muñoz called him to complain about it, he told her not to send any of the children to one of the facilities under consideration in his own state.

The White House also did not comment on the prospect of repercussions for Wasserman Schultz as a result of her comments. Wasserman Schultz herself couldn’t be reached for comment on that suggestion either.

Since the interview was arranged by her government and not political staff, DNC officials pointed questions to her congressional office. They would not comment on the appropriateness of the DNC chair making the comments criticizing Obama beyond DNC communications director Mo Elleithee saying, “She’s always been a strong supporter of the president.”

Bartlett contended that the issue wasn’t that she was trying to attack the president, and pointed to the end of the interview, when Wasserman Schultz said, “What we needed to do was pass the supplemental appropriations bill, the emergency spending bill that the law’s followed.”

And despite her comments to Fusion, when pressed for an explanation, he insisted that’s not at all what she meant.

“If Gov. O’Malley’s intention was to critique administration policy, then she disagrees with him. In no way, shape or form was the congresswoman criticizing administration policy,” Bartlett said. “She fully supports the Obama administration’s efforts and policy and has done so with her vote in support of the president’s emergency supplemental appropriations bill that would increase the number of lawyers available to represent these children.”